I work primarily in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of biology. Most
of what I do is related in some way with the question of what makes certain
entities be about, mean, or represent others.

If you ask me, philosophical research in the areas I am
interested in cannot proceed without very substantial input from the relevant
sciences—neuroscience, psychology, behavioral ecology, among others, as the
case may be. I also believe that a good way of making progress in philosophy
(not the only one, though!) is to construct formal models where insights and
problems can be explored with the help of computational tools.

The Naturalization of Intentionality

I defend a version of teleosemantics: intentional content depends on the
teleological function of representations, or other relevantly related states.

I am currently interested in the construction of computational models which are
expressive enough to pose some of the questions that teleosemantics aims at
solving, and which the recently very influential sender-receiver program,
pursued by Brian Skyrms and others, has so far neglected.

Affective Phenomenology

The phenomenal character of experiences with an affective component
(pains most centrally, but also, e.g., the olfaction of disgusting
odors, and perhaps the visual experiences associated with disturbing
scenes) depends on imperative intentional content.

Substantiating this view involves, first, providing clear conditions for a
representation to count as imperative; and, second, showing how the
neurophysiological basis of affective phenomenology meets those conditions.

The Metaphysics of Natural Kinds

Natural kinds are individuated by sets of properties *informationally
connected to one another. Information-theoretic tools can be used to
measure the naturalness of a kind.

Other Interests

I’ve also done work on modal epistemology (how come that we know of some things
that they are possible, likely, impossible, or necessary?), and the philosophy
of time.

Interests

Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of Biology

Education

PhD in Philosophy, 2010

Universitat de Barcelona

MA in Philosophy, 2006

Universitat de Barcelona

BSc in Chemical Engineering, 1998

Institut Químic de Sarrià

Selected Publications

Information is widely perceived as essential to the study of communication and representation; still, theorists working on these topics often take themselves not to be centrally concerned with ‘Shannon information’, as it is often put, but with some other, sometimes called ‘semantic’ or ‘nonnatural’, kind of information. This perception is wrong. Shannon’s theory of information is the only one we need. I intend to make good on this last assertion by canvassing a fully (Shannon) informational answer to the metasemantic question of what makes something a representation, for a certain important family of cases. This answer and the accompanying theory, which represents a significant departure from the broadly Dretskean philosophical mainstream, will show how a number of threads in the literature on naturalistic metasemantics, aimed at describing the purportedly non-informational ingredients in representation, actually belong in the same coherent, purely information-theoretic picture.

Manolo Martínez

Forthcoming in the PSA 2018 proceedings issue of Philosophy of Science,
2018

According to the homeostatic property cluster family of accounts, one of the main conditions for groups of properties to count as natural is that these properties be frequently co-instantiated. I argue that this condition is, in fact, not necessary for natural-kindness. Furthermore, even when it is present, the focus on co-occurrence distorts the role natural kinds play in science. Co-occurrence corresponds to what information theorists call redundancy: observing the presence of some of the properties in a frequently co-occurrent cluster makes observations of other members of the cluster comparatively uninformative. Yet, scientific practice often, and increasingly often, singles out as natural groups of properties that are not redundant, but synergic: instantiations of properties in synergic clusters are not necessarily informative about instantiations of other properties in the cluster; rather, it is their joint instantiation that plays the explanatory role for which the natural kind is recruited.

We present a dynamic model of the evolution of communication in a Lewis signaling game while systematically varying the degree of common interest between sender and receiver. We show that the level of common interest between sender and receiver is strongly predictive of the amount of information transferred between them. We also discuss a set of rare but interesting cases in which common interest is almost entirely absent, yet substantial information transfer persists in a ‘cheap talk’ regime, and offer a diagnosis of how this may arise.

It is widely held that it is unhelpful to model our epistemic access to modal facts on the basis of perception, and postulate the existence of a bodily mechanism attuned to modal features of the world. In this paper I defend modalizing mechanisms. I present and discuss a decision-theoretic model in which agents with severely limited cognitive abilities, at the end of an evolutionary process, have states which encode substantial information about the probabilities with which the outcomes of a certain Bernoulli process occur. Thus, in the model, a process driven by very simple, thoroughly naturalistic mechanisms eventuates in modal sensitivity.

In the first part of the paper, I present a framework for the description and evaluation of teleosemantic theories of intentionality, and use it to argue that several different objections to these theories (the various indeterminacy and adequacy problems) are, in a certain precise sense, manifestations of the same underlying issue. I then use the framework to show that Millikan’s biosemantics, her own recent declarations to the contrary notwithtanding, presents indeterminacy. In the second part, I develop a novel teleosemantic proposal which makes progress in the treatment of this family of problems. I describe a procedure to derive a (unique) homeostatic property cluster [HPC] from facts having to do with the properties that a certain indicator relied on, in the events leading to its fixation in a certain population. This HPC is the one that should figure in the content attribution to the indicator in question

Representationalist theories of phenomenal consciousness have problems in accounting for pain, for at least two reasons. First of all, the negative affective phenomenology of pain (its painfulness) does not seem to be representational at all. Secondly, pain experiences are not transparent to introspection in the way perceptions are. This is reflected, e.g. in the fact that we do not acknowledge pain hallucinations. In this paper, I defend that representationalism has the potential to overcome these objections. Defenders of representationalism have tried to analyse every kind of phenomenal character in terms of indicative contents. But there is another possibility: Affective phenomenology, in fact, depends on imperative representational content. This provides a satisfactory solution to the aforementioned difficulties.